Mary of Carisbrooke (24 page)

“Then how your Majesty must have hated the manner of both those attempts at escape which Harry planned!”

“He was not to know. Another man would have thought nothing of it; whereas I, who am accustomed to hard hunting and have so frequently been on battlefields, had to nerve myself to climb out of an ordinary window!”

“And that is one fear which your Majesty never has overcome?”

“Oh, but I shall—just as I learned to master horses,” said Charles confidently. “When I was so close to the adventure last time and your father grasped my hands the absurd fear left me. That second time I came almost within sight of conquering the horror of my old nightmare.”

“Perhaps the third time—” said Mary without considering the unlikelihood.

The King laughed. “It seems absurd to suppose that I shall ever have to go out of a window like that again. But I have a feeling that if I do I shall go out without any fear at all, and find that there is nothing on the other side except an adventure which finally kills all fear.

With Libby back at work and Aunt Druscilla recovered from her illness, Mary had more leisure. Taking advantage of a fine afternoon during that wet midsummer, she sat on a stool near the laundry door with Libby’s baby on her lap. He had his mother’s bright, dark eyes and was amusing to play with, but now, bored with a surfeit of attention, he had fallen sound asleep. So soundly that he did not stir when Wenshall came clanking round from the well-house with the water pails.

Mary had never brought herself to speak to either him or Featherstone since their betrayal of the King; and she knew that several of their old comrades, sore from the resultant loss of their Sergeant, avoided them. But only these two men who had been on the platform that night could possibly answer the question that so often tormented her. Acting on impulse, she called to him.

“Who actually shot my father, Wenshall?” she asked abruptly, as he pulled up short with his slopping pails.

Taken aback, he was slow at answering. “’Twas Captain Rolph—” he began.

“But he could not possibly have fired the shot,” said Mary out of the certainty of her secret knowledge.

“’Twas he as gave the order, an’—sorry as we might all be, Mistress Mary—you know none of ’em durst disobey.”

She knew, too, that the order, as the Governor had given it, was right and just. A soldier had been caught in defection from duty. But that the execution of it had been carried out with anything but zeal, she doubted. “Surely you or Featherstone must have
seen
who fired. You were so close,” she urged.

“’Twas midnight,” Wenshall reminded her. “When the King was half out o’ window us
heard
a trigger click, one that didn’t go off like. Someone cursed the plaguey thing—maybe Capt’n himself. Then he give the order, an’ next us knew was the King had nipped back quick, there was a crack from one o’ they new muskets and Sergeant was lyin’ there groanin’. But if you was to ask me—”

But Mary was no longer asking him anything. She could not bear to hear about that groaning. And she had seen his troubled glance rest on the babe in her lap and knew, without his saying so, that it had been Rudy who had fired. She waved the old soldier away and he trudged on, shame-faced yet relieved, through the kitchen door.

Carefully, but without tenderness, Mary put Rudy’s small son back in his basket, and sat there in the fitful sunshine, thinking. Surely public opinion would not condemn her father, or Osborne, or Dowcett or any of them if only they knew that this time they had been trying to save the King’s life? Not even honest Republicans, like General Fairfax and the late John Hampden, could blame them if they knew of Rolph’s dastardly plot.

And this public recognition of the King’s danger was what Richard Osborne was working for. Though she knew, better than anyone, how much revenge and self-justification entered into his purpose.

Immediately upon his arrival on the mainland he had written to Lord Wharton, in whose household he had been, asking him to lay the matter before Parliament; but the cautious, pleasure-loving old man had merely put the letter in his pocket. Through Trattle, Osborne had managed to let her know of this and of his disappointment. And then, determined not to be thwarted, it seemed he had boldly sent the same written statement to Parliament. The Commons, not being wholly ignorant perhaps of the Army’s violent plot, would have ignored the matter, but the Lords had insisted that any possibility of danger to the King’s person must be looked into. And so Osborne had been promised a hearing and offered safe conduct to London.

This was common knowledge on the Wight because in consequence Rolph had been summoned to answer the charge. Although he was better and about his duties again, he was still a sick man and had tried to excuse himself on the grounds that he was not yet fit to travel. But Parliament had insisted.

The next excitement had been when Dowcett was fetched, also under safe conduct. Osborne had asked that he and Worsley might appear as witnesses. Worsley had gone into hiding and could not be found, and his friends thought that he had probably doubled back on to the island and did not want to bring trouble on his family for harbouring him. But Dowcett, having a beloved wife on the mainland, went willingly enough. Before leaving he had been allowed to bid good-bye to Mistress Wheeler and Mary who had been preparing his clothes for the journey, and he had left with them a rough copy of the statement he had prepared as evidence for the Committee of the House of Lords.

“I am ready to take oath,” he had written, “that Mr. Richard Osborne told me the King’s person was in great danger, which information was the cause of my engagement in this business.” He had described Rolph’s plan to lure the King away and kill him and had added, “I am ready likewise to depose that the said Rolph came to me when I was a prisoner in the castle, and in a jeering manner asked me ‘why the King came not down according to his appointment?’ and then with great indignation and fury said that he had waited under the new platform with a good pistol to receive him if he had come.”

And now the trial was going on in Winchester. Everyone was talking about it—people on the mainland because it threw light on what had been happening to the royal prisoner on the island, and people on the Wight because they knew the protagonists. And public favour was swinging towards Osborne, as it always must towards a man who goes out openly to claim justice rather than to a man who makes excuses when asked to come forward.

The court, rumour said, would be packed with Rolph’s supporters, and even now the verdict might be going against her friends. Dowcett’s poor wife must be frantic with anxiety and Mary found herself caring for Richard Osborne’s safety more than she would ever have thought possible. He had asked her to marry him when she herself was unhappy, and now concern for his danger so occupied her thoughts as to turn them even from the all-absorbing emotions of first love and first irrevocable loss.

Although both King and Governor were personally interested in the trial, neither of them had received any reliable information for some days. Dispatches took so long to reach the island. Mary had never realized the frustration of it until now, when she had close friends on the other side. Her thoughts were so much with them that she scarcely noticed the arrival of Trattle’s cart or the stir caused by the weekly supply of liquor being unloaded until one of his men, bringing a few sacks of bran to the laundry, dropped one almost on her feet. Because the strain of the last month or two had told upon her, she jumped nervously and gave vent to an exclamation of annoyance. But instead of receiving an apology she heard a pleasant voice enquiring whether by any chance she were Mistress Mary Floyd.

She looked up into a likeable, fresh-complexioned face which showed more refinement than she would have expected in a drayman’s mate, and was filled with compunction because the fellow seemed to be sweating unduly from his labour; and suddenly it occurred to her that the sack might have been dropped purposely. She got up eagerly, hope flaring in her. “Have you a message for me from Master Trattle?” she asked eagerly.

“Not
from
him, although it is by his connivance that I am able to bring my news. It will take a long time to tell, and this is scarcely the place.”

The coolly amused voice was no labourer’s, and for the first time Mary noticed the freckles. She looked more attentively at the well-built figure clad in fustian with a floury sack flung across the shoulders, and recalled what Dowcett had said about an intrepid woman who, in coat and breeches, would easily pass for a man. “You are Mistress Jane Whorwood!” she stammered in surprise.

“And Trattle’s drayman has instructions to lay a life-size dummy of sacks at the bottom of his cart and drive off without me.”

Jane Whorwood’s buoyant manner would have cheered anyone. Mary carried Libby’s baby into the laundry where his mother was working and hurried her unexpected visitor up to the housekeeper’s room. She was amused to see how readily her aunt made friendly contact with a woman as decided and practical as herself. They had worked in the same cause for so long that it seemed like finding a missing piece of the game, Druscilla said.

“If this escape business had been left to us women in the first place, the King would have been free months ago!” laughed Jane Whorwood in her forthright way. “And now I will strike a bargain with you both. I will give you first-hand news of all our mutual friends if you will help me to see the King.” But before coming to the purpose of her visit she expressed her sympathy for their bereavement with the sincerity which endeared her to so many people.

“Master Dowcett told us that you have known his Majesty for years,” said her hostess.

“My father was Surveyor of the Stables to the late King James, and my step-father was a Groom of the Bedchamber, so I was often at Court. And that is where I met your Governor’s mother. I came up here with Mistress Hopkins, the Newport schoolmaster’s wife, yesterday, to pay our respects to Mistress Hammond, but although the old lady spoke for us to her son, he would not allow us to see the King.”

“He knows too much about your activities with the ship,” said Mistress Wheeler.

“My good friend Harry Firebrace warned me of that.”

Mary looked up apprizingly. Although this woman of whom all men spoke so highly was comely enough, she must be nearly forty. And past love affairs—or so it seemed to a girl not yet eighteen. And any friend of Harry’s must be served. “I could take his Majesty a message or a letter,” she offered.

“Thank you, but I must see him. William Hopkins tells me that his Majesty has been asking for me continually. They all want me to impress upon him the wide rift there now is between Parliament and Army, and that it is from the Army that he stands in most danger. Besides, I know what Charles
is
once a correspondence about some plan is started. He never
could
make up his mind.”

“Then you have yet another plan for his escape?” asked Mary, impressed by her familiar reference to the King.

“Master Hopkins and I have. And we want it all settled
now
. The Hopkinses and those two useful Newport men, Newland and Trattle, whom I met in their house, are convinced that there is strong Royalist sympathy here, and we mean to rouse the whole island and hold the Governor captive while we get the King away.”

Neither of her listeners made any comment. They had heard so many plans discussed and knew the difficulties better than she did. And Mary was impatient to hear news of Osborne.

“And now is the moment to do it,” went on Jane Whorwood unperturbed. “With that brute Rolph away and a wave of sympathy stirred up all over the country by Osborne’s bold revelation. We must be ready to act
now
, the moment he is vindicated.”

Mary turned to her, caring little for the plan but radiant with excitement. “Then the trial is over? And he has been successful?”

“As successful as a loyal subject is ever allowed to be in courts set up by those sanctimonious Roundheads! The fact that no action is being taken against him proves that they are powerless to disprove his accusations. Because of the strong feeling in his favour neither Parliament nor the Army dare molest him openly. They dismissed the case, but he asked me to tell you that he will have to lie low for a while.”

Mary picked up her skirts and executed a triumphant little
pas seul
, and her aunt, who was in her confidence and full of a new gratitude to Osborne, sat down with a sigh of relief. “When they appointed Sergeant Wild as judge we scarcely supposed he had a hope,” she said. “He was that inhuman wretch who condemned poor Captain Burley to death.”

“This trial was just as much of a farce. I went to the Assizes myself. The judge harangued the jury in Rolph’s defence and read out a laudatory letter about him, written by Colonel Hammond. And even though no one could disprove the truth of Osborne’s statement or of Dowcett’s corroborating evidence, the Commons proposed that Rolph should be paid compensation. But the Lords vetoed that.”

“Anything you and the Hopkinses plan to do should be done before Major Rolph returns,” warned Mistress Wheeler. “For he will certainly come back more full of venom and self-confidence than ever.”

“So he is a Major now? Oddfish, how the man steps up!” Standing tall and crop-headed before the window, the indomitable Whorwood woman appeared to enjoy her brief excursion into masculine freedom.

“He will not be satisfied until he is Governor of this castle,” prophesied Druscilla Wheeler. And when the other two looked at her in startled protest, she merely added “Mark my words!” and went on to ask about her favourite, Dowcett.

“Firebrace tells me they took him back to the prison where he was lodged pending the trial. But his wife is allowed to visit him and he is hoping for an early release.”

Mary bent down to adjust a loose buckle on her shoe. “And Harry himself?” she asked, as casually as she could.

“I left him in London with Titus. They are prepared to come back here and help if we can find enough supporters to take the castle.” Aware now of a lack of warmth for her fantastic scheme, Jane Whorwood added with truth, “It will be a manner of escape much more suitable and attractive to Charles than disguises and climbing out of windows.”

“And cause the death of many more men,” Mary remarked with bitterness.

“Poor Burley thought he could take the castle,” sighed her aunt.

“But that absurd rising was not properly organized. Why should it be impossible?”

“We had a garrison of twenty then, and half our guns were obsolete. Whereas now we have over two hundred of Cromwell’s picked troops,” said Mary.

“And more than two thousand secret Royalists living round about. And, between ourselves, Mistress Hammond told me that her son does not sleep too well at night for thinking of them! You have a very fine militia, I am told—trained by loyal local gentry like the Oglanders and the Worsleys and the Leighs. And I tell you that now is the Heaven-sent moment because several ships of Cromwell’s Navy have gone over to Prince Charles in Holland.”